Please sign the petition to help get speed cameras scrapped!It's time to get angry about speed cameras and to make your voice heard. Speed cameras threaten your licence, cost countless millions and distract you from the road ahead.
The government has told you time and time again that speeding is the killer and speed cameras save lives. Every one of their claims is grossly misleading and provably so.
We invite you to examine some sample evidence set out below, and if you agree, please sign the petition to help get speed cameras scrapped.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/scrapcam
Speed cameras have FAILED as a road safety intervention. They are a serious imposition that threatens your licence and your livelihood, but they HAVE NOT made the roads safer. Quite the opposite. They are a ‘big hammer’ and have caused considerable unintended damage to subtle but vital parts of our well balanced national road safety system.
See some of the lies they have been telling us exposed:
Government says ‘one third of crashes are caused by speeding’.
The truth is that only 1 in 20 (5%) injury crashes involves any speeding vehicle. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/29/nspeed29.xml
Government says ‘crashes down by 42% at speed camera sites’
The truth is that most of the reduction is a statistical bias that is well known and understood. The public has been wilfully mislead and the truth is that the reduction in crashes ‘at speed camera sites’ is tiny at best, and probably on average an increase. See it for yourself buried in appendix H at the back of the governments most recent report into speed camera effectiveness:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/cameras/nscp/thenationalsafetycameraprogr4597
Basically it says that the headline benefit claimed for speed cameras has been exaggerated by 400% due to a well known and understood statistical bias. Did they own up that their figures had been misleading everyone for years? No they did not.
Government says ‘It’s thirty for a reason’
The truth is it's 30 because that's a sensible typical speed for an urban environment. It's certainly not true that we chose 30 because of the risk to pedestrians in impacts. We know this for sure because the speed limit was chosen over 40 years before the pedestrian impact research.
You have seen the advert on TV. ‘If you hit me at 30, there's an 80% chance I'll live’. Superficially it sounds perfectly sensible. But would we be happy if we killed 20% of those involved in pedestrian crashes? We're already doing so much better with a 99.6% survival rate in urban child pedestrian crashes. But lots of urban traffic is speeding – over half according to official estimates.
The truth is that impact speed and free travelling speeds are NOT the same. We slow down in areas of danger and we brake before impact. But these vital proven life saving behaviours are being ignored by a policy obsessed with catching us out for speeding.
The TV advert is designed to mislead you.
Government says ‘road safety targets are being met’
The truth is that the targets are only being met because of falls in official ‘serious injury’ figures. But research published in the BMJ shows with clarity and without room for reasonable doubt that it's just the FIGURES that are changing, not road safety at all. The BMJ team found that road crash hospitalisations hadn't fallen for a decade.
See: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/rapidpdf/bmj.38883.593831.4Fv1.pdf
The Future
It's going to get a whole lot worse:
* Did you know that under recent new laws you will soon be able to lose your licence for just TWO speed camera offences? * From 1st April 2007, Local authorities will be able to put speed cameras wherever they like? * Department for Transport has given £110m in grants to fund the madness?
Have you had enough yet?
Please sign the petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/scrapcam
Pass this on to everyone in your address book. The famous roads pricing petition shows that we CAN make a difference.
If you want to know much more of the awful truth about speed cameras pop along to http://www.safespeed.org.uk
Statement by Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign and originator of the petition: “I have been examining the impact of speed cameras on road safety since 2001. I was so shocked about the false claims and especially bad overall road safety results that I gave up work in 2003 to campaign for better road safety policy full time. I've now put in over 20,000 hours in total Please sign the petition. At the very least it will help us along the route to better road safety information, and at the end of the day, that's the only way to save lives.”
